DynamoDB automatically converting special characters

Question

Working with DynamoDB and AWS (.net C#). For some reason when saving strings containing "é" get replaced with a question mark when saved.

How can I prevent it from happening?

Answer 1

DynamoDB stores strings in UTF-8 encoding. Somewhere in the your application you must be assigning that string in something other than UTF-8.

Im using Java (which uses UTF-16). I don't do anything special when storing strings. I just tried storing and retrieving "é" in DynamoDB using the Java SDK and there was no problem.

Answer 2

Just to add to the previous answer, your IDE will generally have encoding settings. You'll want to change the string encoding for your project to UTF-8 to minimize the changes of an encoding error, which can create what is thought to be an unknown string.

For example, in Eclipse editors, you can see this answer to change your encoding.